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I was just talking with a friend about modifying his Tele and putting a hummer in or maybe a single coil in between the bridge and neck. Tossing up all sorts of ideas.
A crazy one just came to mind. What would happen if you had 6 narrow single coils running lengthwise along each string?
You'd get a very dull thick sound. You'd be sensing along a fairly long section of string, so you'd have a lot of comb filtering as a result. A lot of the higher harmonics would get cancelled out, or severely reduced in level compared to a normal orientation. So the lower harmonics would predominate. Rather like turning the tone control down by quite a way.
And the effect of 6 magnets on a single string (plus contributions from adjacent pickups) would result in a lot of string pull, so that the pickups would have to be set very low to avoid horrendous wolf tones.
If you summed the outputs, rather than took each string to a different output, then it wouldn't really be much different to having six normal orientation thin single coil pickups arranged next to each other.
Yeah the more I started thinking about the way the electronics work the more I thought it was a bad idea too. Originally I thought it wasn't that much more than having 2 hummers running at once like on my Ibanez. And then I thought one of my Strats has a neck-on switch which lets me run all 3 pickups so what if that was on the Ibanez and I had a 3rd hummer in the middle instead of the single?
But in all those cases each magnet pole is wrapped in a different coil circuit not all wrapped together in a single coil. I guess they're also further apart so the pull isn't as great.
Anyway it would have been nice to have a block of 6 slimline singles that could rotate 90 degrees and a gazillion-way switch for all sorts of combos. :)
Although now I'm thinking some sort of sliding option might be worth a try for the middle pickup so I can move it closer to either the bridge or neck for different variations.